Dr. Metablog is the nom de blague of Vivian de St. Vrain, the pen name of a resident of the mountain west who writes about language, books, politics, or whatever else comes to mind. Under the name Otto Onions (Oh NIGH uns), Vivian de St. Vrain is the author of "The Big Book of False Etymologies" (Oxford, 1978) and, writing as Amber Feldhammer, is editor of the classic anthology of confessional poetry, "My Underwear" (Virago, 1997).

Dr. Metablog's Greatest Hits

December 18, 2011

If the profoundly Christian seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical passage, it might be the one in which the Lord (speaking through His minor prophet Amos) severely condemned the empty vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies." The Lord of Hosts specifically enjoined against the attempt to placate him by sacrificing animals (a matter of topical concern in Amos' time). "Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts." Nor did He rest with these easy-to-follow injunctions, but He went on to condemn all musical tributes as well. Not for him any chants, glees or carols: "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols." Our Puritan forefathers interpreted these lines correctly and enthusiastically; they recognized that the Lord opposed not only ritual sacrifice and music but all formal observance and rote piety. The Ancient of Days made it abundantly clear that what moved him was not empty ceremony but genuine morality. HIs solution: "let justice run down as the waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Taking these uncompromising sentences as their guide, our founders dug in their heels against the ostentatious celebration of all holidays, especially Christmas. Instead, they did as they were enjoined: they looked into their hearts.

Would they not have been reduced to angry and impotent sobs by the grotesque consumerism -- the burnt offerings and squeaking timbrels -- that once again this Christmas season displace justice and righteousness? Could there be anything more loathsome either to Amos or to our devout ancestors than "Silent Night" amidst shopping-mall tinsel and gimcrackery? Or than the attempt to gin up conflict or to gain a partisan political advantage by inventing a mythical "war on Christmas"?

December 10, 2011

Here in peaceful, progrressive Boulder, two commissioners' seats are coming open next election. Commissioners are important officers: they directly govern the half of our citizens who live in unincorporated areas of the county, they employ 1800 people and administer a $300 million budget, they manage all the social services, and they set policy on land use, open space, transportation, etc. They also put out fires.

Even though we're six months away from the primary, campaigning is well under way. And should be. Deciding on he right county officer is important. We're a functioning democracy.

This afternoon there was a forum to allow the six candidates to answer questions and state their views. But just as the meeting was called to order, we were "occupied."

About fifty or sixty people filed into the room, took up places around the perimeter, interrupted the moderator and announced that they had a statement to make, which they did in a peculiar and theatrical manner. Their leader read a few words, and then the rest of the folks repeated the same phrase, in chorus. Their demands were well known: control the big banks, put an end to corporate dominance, stop the foreclosures, support the homeless, reduce pollution, prohibit fracking, end uranium mining, and prevent any GMO crops from being grown in Boulder County.

Then they left. Just vanished.

And so we got back to work.

What was so odd is that every single one of the candidates stated positions that were at least as far to the left, and sometimes further to the left, than the Occupiers -- which makes me wonder whether these very sincere folks wouldn't be doing more good by helping us stuff the envelopes and do the lit drops and help with the GOTV. To tell the exact truth, I found it just a little offensive to be hectored so dramatically by political novices.

At very least, the "Occupiers" should give up the choral speaking, which sounds not like thoughtfulness but rather like authoritarian groupspeak. A little dictatorial.

As the political philosopher and social critic Doll Tearsheet long ago remarked, "the word occupy... was an excellent good word before it was ill sorted."

August 13, 2011

The number of Republicans who are waiting for a signal from God about whether or not to run for president of the USA continues to grow. They're waiting and waiting and waiting.

And meanwhile, surprising is it may seem, God the Father revealed himself to me -- me! --just last night. He woke me out of a sound sleep (which is a kind of miracle in itself because I had taken a double dose of Ambien). I have no idea why I was chosen as the Vessel of His Wisdom, but, you know, God moves in mysterious ways. I swear as I hope to go to Heaven that it was the one true God Who spoke to me.

God said, and this is a direct, verbatim quote, "I do not want Rick Perry to run for President." I asked Him why, in His Infinite Majesty, he was so opposed to a Perry candidacy. He said (and here His Voice became so strong, so 'out-of-a-whirlwind', that it actually rattled our windows --but they're old windows and the points and putty could stand replacing), "because he's a doofus, and also because of he could only earn a "D" in the Shakespeare course at Texas A & M. Imagine that. A "D" in Shakespeare?" God was clearly outraged. "You are aware," he intoned, "that according to Victor Hugo, 'after God, Shakespeare has created the most?'"

It was interesting to me that God didn't look the way He does in the inspired Michelangelo ceiling, which is what I would have expected. He looked more like Shazam in the old Captain Marvel comic books. Old and bald, and kind of indistinct. But it was definitely God. I could feel it in my gut. Trust me.

I asked Him if He had any other preferences in the upcoming election. He sighed. "I don't want either Bachmann or Palin either. They're doofae." I wasn't surprised that God was so adamantine about B and P, because of their shallow religiosity and deficient knowledge of history, but I was truly shocked that God called them by the faux-Latin feminine plural "doofae." I mean, doofus isn't even a real Latin word, despite its -us ending, and so there's no singular feminine "doofa." I would have thought that God would have a better command of His Latinity. I was so taken aback that I forgot to ask Him how he felt about Newt, whom I myself would definitely prefer to be the Republican candidate. He's so adorable.

But the grammar of the Godhead is beside the point. The absolute true fact is that He has spoken quite plainly. We mortals need to know no more but simply to walk humbly in His ways, which means that Perry and the two ladies should take heed of this authentic Divine Intervention and decline to pursue elected office. For them to continue to press forward, at this juncture and with this revelation, would be nothing short of blasphemy.

June 24, 2011

Neolithic Malta presents an exemplum and a warning. The island received its first human inhabitants, who probably arrived from Sicily, some time around 5000 BC. After about 3600 BC, trade and other links with the outside world waned. Over the next thousand years or so, the people of Mlata built seventeen monumental stone temples unlike any elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

These are the remains of one of the seventeen.

Here's a view of another:There's something truly remarkable about these megalithic temples, but it's troubling that a marginal and isolated culture would make such a huge and economically unproductive investment. Indeed, starting about 2300 BC, this native Maltese culture went into precipitous decline. A major cause seems to have been the extreme deforestation and soil loss when the population increased and resources were overused. The best guess is that the Maltese experienced an economic and spiritual crisis.

They did not, alas, confront the environmental problem; instead, the evidence suggests that the people, probably led by an oppressive priestly caste, continued to make greater and greater investments in religious worship, no doubt hoping that their gods would rescue them from their predicament. "In the end their expectations were not met and crisis ensued from which it took centuries to recover" (Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, [Yale, 2008], p. 172.) The population disappeared, the culture was extinguished and Malta was deserted until the arrival of Bronze Age peoples around 2000 BC.

Let's go over this ground and make sure that we understand. The neolithic inhabitants of Malta temporarily increased their population at the expense of massive enviromental degradation, and then, as the standard of living dropped, decided that the best way to deal with the crisis was to make mammoth investments in priests and temples (rather than, say, birth control and sustainable forestry and agriculture).

Is there a moral here. We report, you decide. But I believe that I can hear the debate. "We've already built fifteen temples and it hasn't worked. Perhaps we should try something new, like planting trees." "Nonesense, young radical. We must look to faith. Faith will reward us. One more temple, this one really huge. More stones over here!"

May 30, 2011

It's election season once again. I'm thinking of making a run for city council in our progressive western town. Here's my revised platform, voters.

1. NO LEAF BLOWERS. Rationale: it's a horrible noisy unecological machine that can easily be replaced with a broom. And everyone knows that single-stroke engines are major polluters.

2. ALL MALL PERFORMERS MUST BE JURIED. Rationale: no more off-key singing. No more bad juggling. No more ugly balloon animals. No more noisy drummers or whining didgeredoos.

3. EVERY RESTAURANT MUST KEEP A PIG. Rationale: a perfect, ecologically-sound solution to the waste food problem. Come to think of it, let's require a piggery of all institutions with lunchrooms, such as high schools and hospitals. Let's fatten up those porkers, turn them into bacon and savory spare ribs.

5. NEW ANNUAL HOLIDAY: Charles Darwin's birthday, February 12. Rationale: uncontroversial celebration of a great thinker. (I reject out of hand those extremists who propose to celebrate Darwin's birthday on December 25. I'm a uniter, not a divider.)

6. NO MUSIC WRITTEN AFTER 1897. Rationale: obvious. Why 1897? Death of Johannes Brahms. Also, no amplified music of any kind in an automobile that is audible outside the vehicle. Higher fines and jail terms hip hop and for excessively patriotic "country."

7. NO SMOKERS. Rationale: lung cancer, heart attacks, emphysema, ashes, disgusting odor, cigarette litter on the sidewalk. Note: not "no smoking"-- "no smokers." No going outside of city limits to light up and then re-entering.

8. NO VISIBLE TATTOOS. Why only "visible "tattoos? Because whole-body inspections might be considered intrusive by squishy civil libertarians. Also, no nose rings, navel rings, or other bodily piercings. Except earrings. I rather like earrings. But no more than one per ear.

9. ANNUAL JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL PRAIRIE DOG SHOOT AND BARBECUE. Let them kids exercise their Second Amendment rights; eliminate them pesky varmints; learn to cook. One platform position, three social benefits.

10. NO DOGS PERMITTED WITHIN CITY LIMITS. Rationale: fatal dog attacks, dog bites, barking dogs, squealing dogs, ubiquitous dog "waste," dogs carrying on in parks and open space, the goopy indulgence of dog "guardians," the ecological disaster of dog food. But what about seeing-eye dogs, you ask? Well, that's a slippery slope, ain't it. Sorry folks, no dogs (except for purposes of vivisection).

11. NO MORE COLLEGE FOOTBALL. Rationale: I don't like college football.

12. NO "FACILITATORS" WITH WHITEBOARDS OR FLIPCHARTS AT MEETINGS. Goodness gracious, am I ever tired of those things.

That's about it. I feel that I have my finger on the pulse of the electorate. It's going to be a landslide. Tell me that life won't be better as soon as we enact these new laws

May 13, 2011

The New York Times says that former employees of Wells Fargo admit that they "systematically singled out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages." "These loans," Baltimore officials have claimed in a federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, "tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services." Why did the bank act with such malice? Because Wells Fargo "saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Wells Fargo employees picturesquely identified these transactions as "ghetto loans" made to “mud people.”

The city of Baltimore has filed a suit against Wells Fargo. "The toll taken by such policies, Baltimore officials argue, "is terrible. Data released by the city as part of the suit show that more than half the properties subject to foreclosure on a Wells Fargo loan from 2005 to 2008 now stand vacant. And 71 percent of those are in predominantly black neighborhoods."

It's called reverse redlining -- systematically marketing the most expensive and onerous loans to black customers.

So here's the deal. The city of Baltimore loses, the neighborhoods lose, individual families are financially crippled for a lifetime, and the CEO of Wells Fargo gets a 50% raise to $21,000,000 a year. What a deal!

What's going to happen to the suit? It was filed in January, 2008. Three years later, after a predictable spate of legal wrangling, a federal judge has allowed the suit to go forward, but not before Wells Fargo "succeeded in limiting the pretrial discovery the city has been able to get and in limiting the allegations and damages the city could claim if the case makes it to trial." A bank spokeswoman said Wells Fargo will “continue to defend ourselves vigorously.”

Here's what's going to happen. The bank, which has far greater resources that the city, will assign a couple of hundred lawyers to the case and wear down Baltimore with various hair-splitting motions. Judges will retire and/or die. The case will be in the courts for an unknown number of Jarndyce and Jarndyce units of time. After a generation or so, when most of the aggrieved will have long since left the earth, Wells Fargo will settle for a slap on the wrist and pay a nominal fine, but admit to no guilt. The bank will trumpet its vindication. Justice will not be served. It will be bought.

Can we possibly imagine what will have happened to the many thousandes of no-longer-occupied houses and to their one time oh-so hopeful purchasers? Nothing good, trust me.

May 02, 2011

While indulging a long, pleasant walk this morning, I happened upon a shop I had never before noticed. It's called Juno's Studio of Contemporary Hair Artistry. I ws curious as to whether a "hair artistry studio" was what we called in the old days a "barber shop" or a "beauty shop." I tried to peek inside the shop but the situation was a tad too "architectooralooral" (in Mr. Joe Gargery's phrase) for me to feel comfortable doing so. Nevertheless, I was sufficiently intrigued about "contemporary hair artistry" to visit Juno's website. I am now prepared to "share" with my readership what I have learned. The following paragraph comes to you absolutely verbatim.

"Jules Juno’s passion for the hair industry pulses through her life and work at every turn and every look, as her creative spirit is continuously fueled by the rhythms, themes and movements of the subtle and deep rich nuances of the world around her - from the street to the flora, feathers and fur of nature, to the lines of fashion and art in all its forms. Aligned closely with the powerful totem of Raven and ready to celebrate newness in light of every full moon, she dwells in the magic of change and transformation. Often called the “Hair Shaman” and “Keeper of the Hair” by her devoted clients, Jules believes in the sacredness of being trusted to work her creative magic on the high chakra space of one’s head."

I can tell you one person whose brilliant (though graying) mane Juno's not going work her creative magic upon (even though the hair industry pulses through every deep rich nuance of its rhythms, themes and movements). Mine, that's who's. Keep your ever-loving hands off my high chakra space, Hair Shaman!!

Upon further investigation, Juno (her real name?) turns out to be a disciple of Minnesotan Horst Rechelbacher -- under whose tutelage she taught "for a triune of years before adventuring her creative genius as a platform artist." In our town, she plans to "keep the fires of inspiration burning and push the edges of hair design."

And while here, she will also "push the edges" of New Age Bullshit.

By the way, what the heck is a "platform artist?" And what distinguishes a "triune of years" from "three years?"

March 06, 2011

I have a favorite moment in Diner (1982), the first of Barry Levinson's quartet of Baltimore movies, and it's not the scene in which I made my silver-screen debut. It's when two of the working-class guys who hang out at the Fells Point hamburger joint find themselves taking a drive in the Maryland countryside. They happen upon a rich, well-tended young blonde woman riding an elegant horse (in her own spacious meadow). They stop the car try to chat her up but she's clearly out of their league. When she gallops off, one of the guys says to the other: "Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about?"

I was thinking about that scene when I read that Moammar Ghaddafi's son Seif threw himself a birthday party at some spectacular resort in the West Indies and paid the pop singer Mariah Carey $1,000,000 smackerootis to sing four songs. You read it right -- one millions bucks. The article didin't say whether she had to pay for her own motel and continental breakfast and transportation but I'm going to guess that expenses were extra.

I tried to calculate whether I had earned $1M in my working life. I can't remember and I don't have the records, but I know that I started at $3600 and by 1966 I was already pulling down $7800. I think that in my first decade of employment I earned well under $100,000. Yeah, I know, them was different dollars -- but still.

A working guy who makes $40,000 would take 25 years to earn what Mariah Carey took home for twenty minutes of effort.

But it's not what she earned so much as what he paid. The Ghaddafi clan of brutes, lunatics, oil-bloated twits, and kleptocrats has been looting the Libyans for forty years. No wonder that the family is willing to commit mass murder to hold on to their hoard. (In his defence, Seif claimed that it wasn't him; it was his brother Muatassim.) Here's a question: how many years does it take your run-of-the-mill Libyan to earn $1M?

I think that the average Libyan would understand the point of view of the diner guys. There's something going on out there, and it ain't all good.

February 28, 2011

Dr. M: "Do you think that these tea party Republicans can be educated?"

State Rep: "I'm not hopeful. They don't know much about governing. They don't want to know anything. They're very disciplined -- they vote exactly the way they're told to vote. And they're not very intelligent."

February 26, 2011

I went to a forum, sponsored by local Dems, with our congressman. Fifty or sixty of my friends and neighbors were in attendance. Our congressman is a good person -- smart, informed, energetic, and progressive. He described the situation in the House of Representatives -- the difficulty of serving in the minority, especially when so many members of the majority side aren't serious about governing. The audience was sympathetic but there was an undercurrent of impatience. Why can't the Dems make it clear that cutting taxes and cutting the deficit are incompatible goals? Why do the Dems always lose the messaging wars? Our congressman's answers were not always satisfactory to his liberal constituents.

I understand his plight; i's easy to stand outside and criticize. But I also felt that he didn't appreciate how damn dangerous these right-wing Republicans and tea-partiers have become. The gap between rich and poor is becoming larger and less ameliorable. We could lose our democracy to the corporations.

Afterwards, I asked him, semi-privately, if the new Republican congressman can be educated. Will they ever come to realize that governing is a hard job that can't be done with slogans and a simplistic ideology. He didn't think much of my question and didn't answer it.

I was filled with foreboding when I left for the forum. I returned home even more pessimistic about the future.

January 25, 2011

Every little once in a while, a mountain lion creeps into the fold and snares a lamb, a calf, or a German shepherd. At even more infrequent intervals, a mountain lion attacks a human being (usually a child). Whenever there's a human-lion interaction, there comes a deluge of letters to the local newspaper demanding that the authorities exercise “lethal control" over the big cats. Killing catamounts is neither hard nor dangerous. They were hunted nearly to extinction in the nineteenth century. Dogs chase the animal up a tree. The brave hunter takes aim and fires.

But Is it a good idea to extirpate the mountain lion? In the United States, there’s an average of one death by mountain lion a year. Here in our county, there’s been one such death in the last hundred years. One is a very low number, especially when, in the country as a whole, snakes cause a dozen deaths each year, lightning claims seventy-five, bee and wasp stings a hundred. Dogs, when they’re not out hunting mountain lions, account for between twelve to twenty deaths a year – a couple of hundred a decade-- many of these, it's sad to say, infants in the crib. Given the numbers, It’s hard to believe that calls for the extermination of mountain lions aren’t motivated less by facts than by fear.

Domesticated dogs are responsible not only for a dozen to a score of deaths, but also for an estimated 4 to 7 million (that’s right, million!) cases of dog-bite a year, almost 800,000 of which require medical attention. Dog bites cause 368,000 emergency room visits, or (do the math!) one thousand such visits a day. The social cost of dog bites is estimated variously, but the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta claims that the direct medical costs of dog bites per year is $165 million, with many more millions in ancillary expenses.

Mountain lions, which are relatively harmless, inspire terror, but dogs, which are far more dangerous, are our sacred cows -- loved, in my opinion, beyond all propriety. It’s hard not to cringe when otherwise sensible people – good decent people --tell me in all seriousness that Towser is a full member of their family, or that Fido is about to undergo surgery to replace a hip -- an operation the cost of which is more than the annual medical budget of whole villages in Africa or Asia. The run-of the-mill doggie in America enjoys a better diet and better medical care than half of the human beings on the planet -- a thoroughly indefensible skewing of resources. Dogs are not human beings, and it’s immoral sentimentality to treat them as such. It’s embarrassing.

The ancients, following Aristotle, divided their possessions into three categories: an object was an instrumentum mutum, an animal was an instrumentum semivocale, and a slave was an instrumentum vocale. By eliding the differences between humans and animals, the Greeks and the Romans made slavery both easy and natural. Aristotle's notion underlay serfdom.

I used to worry that people who treated animals as humans would be tempted to treat humans as animals. But it's not so; the people I know who are sentimental about animals and "animal rights" are extraordinarily sensitive to human rights -- but then, perhaps my sample is skewed. All of my friends are sensitive to human rights; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be my friends.

I wonder whether the love of dangerous dogs and the fear of the cats who are by and large indifferent to us isn’t an instinct acquired slowly over the last half million years. Our ancestors, armed, at best, with flint-headed spears, spent countless millennia at the mercy of feline predators larger, more powerful and more terrifying than 100-pound mountain lions (the extinct European lion, panthera leo fossilis, was taller, stronger, and and a foot and a half longer than the modern African lion). It was only some 50,000 years ago that an ancient Einstein conceived the idea of domesticating wolves and selecting their population for useful traits. Humans and proto-dogs started to cohabit; dwellings and caves came to be littered with coprolites. Co-evolution began, and over the course of time, dogs and humans came to be sensitive to each other's traits. Those early dogs were our first allies on this lonely, hostile planet. They could raise a ruckus when a couple or three lionesses prowled about the entrance to the cave.

We're indebted to dogs and so we tolerate their bad habits. By the same token, we have inherited from our ancestors a primordial fear. Hence the over-hasty cry to exterminate the mountain lion.

January 19, 2011

Certainly not either by inheritance or conversion or moral stance. Yet Sarah Palin seems to imagine that she's Jewish -- in a peculiar, one-dimensional way. It's not always easy to guess at what's going on in that soup of a brain, but is it possible to determine what Sarah means when she claims to be a victim of a "blood libel?"

The actual targets of the "blood libel," it is no secret, are not overpaid Foxy commentators but ordinary Jews who, according to pious medieval preachers, Henry Ford, Nazi propagandists, and contemporary Syrian statesmen, make it a practice to drain innocent babes of their blood, which they then bake into matzos.

Here are the exact words in which Sarah invokes this hideous accuation: "journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.” It's a confusing sentence, hard to explicate. Can we be confident that Sarah is learned enough to know that "blood libel" is a phrase with a long and agonizing history? Are the "hatred and violence," which she claims are visited upon her, designed to recall the pogroms (and worse) that have been precipitated by the "blood libel"? If her sentence is to be taken seriously, Sarah believes that she is the victim of an attack analogous to the worst kind of anti-Semitic ravings. Just as Jews are accused of killing Christian children, so has Sarah herself been unjustly accused of killing Representative Gabrielle Giffords. In her scenario, in her analogy, she herself, Sarah Palin, is the Jew.

In her daily deeds, Sarah Palin does not seem to understand or embrace aspects of Jewish tradition such as compassion, the centrality of community, a deep reverence for education and learning, fierce and informed intellectuality, and robust philanthropy. Pure and simple, she sees herself as a victim -- a condition or state of mind, which, in my opinion, is not only incorrect but dangerous to the polity and to her own self-regard.

January 09, 2011

I've been inspecting the entrails of slaughtered oxen and also observing the flights of birds. I've studied the movements of planets and tea leaves. I can now announce my predicitons for the coming year.

1) there will be unusual weather patterns in North America;

2) a famous Hollywood actress will sue for divorce; moreover, another (or possibly the same) Hollywood star will become pregnant; another (or possibly the same) actress will gain and/or lose a great deal of weight;

3) a well-known athlete will be accused of taking drugs;

4) a politician will be involved in a sex scandal;

5) questions will be raised about America's food supply;

6) there will be either a monsoon, an airplane crash, or a capsized ferry in Asia--perhaps all three;

7) there will be fluctuations in the stock market;

8) there will be turmoil in the Middle East;

9) a religious leader will be involved in either a financial or a sexual scandal (perhaps both);

10) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will not end.

You read it here first. Not for nothing that I've acquired the reputation of an inspired mystic, or shaman, or something. Nostradamus redux.

December 31, 2010

Just back from the post office, where I mailed the granddaughter her gift, a zester. What is a zester, you ask? It's a kitchen device designed to remove the "zest," that is, the outermost skin of a citrus fruit. The granddaughter's zester is an inch and a half wide and thirteen inches long, including its five inch handle. Essentially, it's a hand-held grater, very useful if you're a cooking enthusiast. And why, you ask, would I venture out in 15F, snowy weather to mail the zester to California, when the grand-daughter could have put it in her backpack when she returned home? Because, I was creditably advised, the zester would certainly be confiscated by airport security.

What have we come to, when, rightly or wrongly, we seriously entertain the idea that an eleven-year-old child could hijack an airplane armed only with a zester? What would she do, abrade the pilot to death?

December 22, 2010

The Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrated themselves with a $100-per-person Secession Ball on Dec. 20 in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium in Charleston. The event centered on a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago. Jeff Antley, who organized the event, said that the Secession Ball honors South Carolinians who stood up for their rights. “The secession movement in South Carolina was a demonstration of freedom,” said Antley. “What I’m doing is honoring the men from this state who stood up for their self-government and their rights under law."

Is the act of secesion a "demonstration of freedom?" What sort of freedom? Let us now read from South Carolina's Articles of Secession, which asserts that the federal government has impinged upon states' rights.

"The right of property in slaves was recognized [under the Constitution] by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety."

Yes, it's true. Citizens of some states have not captured fugitive slaves or returned them to their owners, have denounced slavery as sinful, have elected a president who is hostile to the "peculiar institution," and have (horror of horrors! even granted citizenship to former slaves.

The South Carolina document is extraordinarily clear. Can anyone fairly doubt that there would have been no secession and therefore no need for a Secession Ball except in defense of slavery? The "demonstration of freedom" is nothing more than a celebration of the freedom of one person to own another.

Nowadays, when slavery is no longer defensible, "conservative" South Carolinians are reduced to protecting their guaranteed right to make life difficult for gays and immigrants. And keep women in their places. A far cry from their glorious past.

But they continue to nurture that nostalgia for the great old antebellum days.

October 25, 2010

Sometimes I can't make the slightest sense of what I read in the newspapers. Here's an example. But first some sheep news.

The desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni), smaller than the ordinary bighorn and one of the rarest and most endagered our native mammals, has been reduced to dry ranges in Nevada and California, near rocky cliffs in almost waterless environments. "Hunting has been prohibited or controlled since the early 1900s, but much illegal poaching still occurs. The subspecies Ovis canadensis auduboni of the Black Hills and adjacent areas has already become extinct."

Now the newspaper report. The Longmont Times-Call celebrates a local heroine, Ms. Sara Brandenburg.

"At age 15, Brandenburg became the youngest female in the world to the earn the North American Grand Slam after shooting and killing four different species of North American wild sheep — a dall, a stone, a Rocky Mountain bighorn and a desert bighorn. She shot a 230-pound dall sheep Aug. 17, 2009, in Alaska and pinned her final animal — a 220-pound stone sheep — in the Yukon Territory on Aug. 8, four days before her 16th birthday.The previous record-holder was a 32-year-old, according to the Grand Slam Club/Ovis.When she shot the stone sheep — the final one for her grand slam — tears poured down her face. “It’s a big emotional rush when you get it,” she said. While working on the record, Brandenburg, who is a sophomore at Longmont Christian School, missed two months of classes. She ended the year with a 4.0 grade-point average, in part because she hauled textbooks on hunts. Moments before shooting her desert bighorn sheep in Mexico’s Baja Desert, she was finishing algebra homework. Her father, Rod Brandenburg, taught Sara and her older sister, Katey, 18, to hunt at an early age, instilling in them the same pioneer spirit his great-grandfather had when he moved from Germany to homestead in the 1870s in Westcliffe, Colo. He estimated it cost about $120,000 to arrange for Sara to kill four sheep. When friends remark about the cost, Brandenburg says it was worth it. “I couldn’t afford not to,” he said. When he watched Sara shoot her final sheep, a wave of relief, exhilaration and admiration washed over him, he said. Last month, she took up archery and hopes to repeat the grand slam with a bow this time or advance to the Super 10 title, which is awarded to hunters who shoot and kill 10 North American big-game animals. In addition to sheep, Sara Brandenburg also has shot and killed three antelopes, one white-tailed deer and one black bear, as well as a gemsbok, an eland, a wildebeest and a zebra during a hunting trip in South Africa."

I don't understand blood sports. I find them repulsive and inhuman.

Am I missing something? The Brandenburg family values ($120,000 to kill four rare sheep) are disgusting, sociopathic, and barbaric. Are these people locked into the Stone Age?

April 23, 2010

We all remember, and we're all still shocked and amazed that the late, lamentable Jerry Falwell proclaimed that the 9/11 attacks on the US were caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and
the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians." How to understand either the logic or the brain of such a thinker? We moderns tend to reason in terms of cause and effect, and cause and effect just doesn't cut it with Falwell. Was he thinking something like, feminists cause sin (a debatable proposition) and Al-Qaeda wants to cleanse us, so they run the airplanes into the towers. That would be unbelievable nonsense, even for Falwell. Here's another attempt to divine his mind: feminists are dangerous and evil and therefore the good old US of A has become Sodom/ Gomorrah/ Ephesus and the Big Guy in the Sky is offended and therefore he engaged Al-Qaeda to punish the US for its sins by enabling or permitting those young Saudi jerks to fly planes into the towers in order to persuade us to repudiate the feminists. Yes, that makes sense. Sort of.

Similarly, Pat Robertson deduced that Hurricane Katrina was all about abortion. In this case, the Ancient of Days didn't even bother to enlist human agents. Noticing that there were abortions being performed in the US, he let loose the winds from the caves in which he had kept them confined and instructed them to bust up the New Orleans dikes and drown a lot of people.

Jerry and Pat are a pair of idiots, not because they lack intelligence, because their view of the world is five hundred or a thousand years behind the times. They'd be mainstream in dark/medieval Europe when Attila the Hun and Timur (or Tamburlaine) the Great competed for the title of Scourge of God --the flagelllum dei. They pillaged and burned and raped over vast areas of the world not because they were imperialists and conquerors but because they were instruments of god. They wreaked vengeance on our sins. It was orthodoxy. Cause and effect? Sorry, not part of the picture.

The fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc -- "after this therefore because of this" -- means that just because B comes after A doesn't mean that A causes B. Just because an abortion is followed by a hurricane doesn't mean that the abortion caused the hurricane. Just because someone prays to one or another god and recovers from illness doesn't mean that the prayer caused the cure. The volcano isn't quiescent because we sacrificed the maiden. No religion, not a single one, can bear the light of post hoc. Fully honored, it puts them all out of business. Along with all the other varieties of magical thinking.

All this hardly bears mentioning except that a couple of days ago, a 'senior Iranian cleric" Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, pronounced that very soon a massive earthquake will devastate the city of Teheran and that the earthquake will be caused by "women who do not dress modestly. [Such women] lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes." There's a chain of logic for you. A guy catches a glimpse of a lock of hair, or, god forbid, a bit of bosom, and boom --earthquake. But it's not his fault -- it's that his natural chastity has been compromised by them there female blandishments. Delilah all over again. Forget the movement of tectonic plates. The energy released in earthquakes isn't caused by subduction. It's ankles. The senior Iranian cleric has not correctly grasped the meaning of the demotic phrase, "the earth moved."

Sedighi is a boob and is even more presumptuous and illogical than Pat and Jerry. The earthquake hasn't even occurred and he's already blaming it on the outfits. He's launched a pre-emptive strike on post hoc. His is a fallacy so monumentally illogical that hasn't yet earned a name.

It's instructive that Shakespeare, writing before the age of reason and before the scientific revolution, offered a full debate on the subject. In King Lear, Gloucester takes the traditional view. Eclipses, like hurricanes, are filled with meaning. Gloucester does not hold with reason or with the logic that he calls "the wisdom of nature."

"These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason, and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father... We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves."

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune -- often the surfeit of our own behavior -- we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. And admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star. My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing."

Gloucester is, in our terms, superstitious and simple, but he's also orthodox and reverent. Edmund is realistic and rational, but he is also as loathsome a villain as Shakespeare ever created. Shakespeare is a late medieval writer, which is why he should not necessarily be looked to for moral advice but rather for great poetry, great stories, and aesthetic bliss.

Meanwhile, the "excellent foppery of the world" has become the province of fundamentalists of all stripes.

April 07, 2010

The most famous, I think, must be Itzhak Perlman, who is the earth's most versatile and distinguished violinist -- and is also father of five next-generation members of the tribe. Almost as widely known but perhaps not so spectacularly talented, is Rhea Perlman, better known as Carla Tortelli, mother to many. The most brilliant of the clan, and certainly the most eccentric is Grigori Yakovlevich ("Grisha") Perelman, the mathematician who solved Poincare's conjecture and then refused both the Fields Medal (the Nobel Prize of mathematics) and the $1 million Clay Millenium Prize. Grisha demonstrated what most of us simply take for granted: that any closed three-dimensional manifold where any loop can be contracted to a point is really just a three-dimensional sphere. There's also Ron Perelman, a consummate and ruthless corporate raider, once the richest man in America, now, alas, fallen to 18th -- nor any longer contracted to nonce-wife #4, Ellen Barkin. The most amusing of all Pearlmans is surely Brooklynite S. J. Perelman, screenwriter of two great Marx Brothers vehicles -- Horse Feathers and Monkey Business. The most reprehensible of the cousinhood is certainly Lou Pearlman, accomplished Ponzi-artist and the mogul behind the bubble-gummy Backstreet Boys, whom he used and possibly sexually abused to the tune of $300 million -- and who is now serving a 25-year term in federal prison. Infinitely more respectable is the composer and conductor Martin Pearlman, who learned his trade at Cornell and who is a harpsichordist as well as the founder of the Boston Baroque. Nor should any Pearlman census overlook Ron Perlman, aka Amoukar the Ulam, who many years ago quested for fire. Nor sportwriter Jeff Pearlman, pitcher Jon Perlman, writer Edith Pearlman, film critic Cindy Pearlman; nor the great rhetorician of a prior generation, Chaim Pearlman.

And also: standing at the top of the heap in the world of fiction is The Wire's incorruptible Maryland Assistant State Attorney, Rhonda Pearlman.

March 22, 2010

Last night,one of our dinner guests said that at least we no longer have to worry about "pre-existing conditions." Persnickety about language as always, I pointed out that the phrase "pre-existing condition" was a ridiculous piece of jargon. What is meant is "existing conditions?" A condition can't exist before it exists.

"Aha," said another of my guests, a Lutheran minister,"now you've opened a theological questions." He was referring to the disputed doctrine that the existence of Jesus preceded his incarnation in the womb.

But if "pre-existence" is only taken seriously by theologians and by insurance executives, then I'm going to stand on my claim that the phrase is both obscurantist or bureaucratic and should be discarded from common use. "Existing" is sufficient.

Moreover, the notion that insurance should be granted to the healthy but denied to the ill is a more dangerous travesty than the mystification of "pre-existence."

March 01, 2010

A sorority girl fell off the roof of her house last week. She was,of course, staggeringly drunk. She messed herself up pretty badly but she will live. Accidents of this kind happen regularly in our college town. Kids fall off roofs, kids drive drunk and kill someone or themselves, or kids just binge-drink themselves to death. It's regrettable that we've become accustomed to such stories. I think it's the saddest thing: a family raises a child for twenty years, sends him or her off to college with great hopes -- and two weeks later the kid has fallen off a roof or choked to death on her vomit.

As a result of this latest incident, the neighbors have been waging an internet war. One noisy faction insists that it's our policies that are at fault -- that kids drink themselves to oblivion because alcohol is legally prohibited until age twenty-one. If alcohol were legal, the argument goes, students would then do their drinking in a controlled environment, such as an adult-supervised party or a bar with rules on over-serving, and they wouldn't indulge in private. It's a paradoxical argument -- alcohol would be safer if it were not prohibited.

After a great deal of back-and-forth and uninformed argumentation, one of the neighbors, an epidemiologist who has actually studied the problem, presented some data. That when New Zealand lowered the drinking age from 21 to 18, binge drinking and accidental deaths increased. That binge drinking is higher in European countries, some of which allow alcohol at age 16, than in the U.S. That underage drinking declines, sometimes by as much as 40%, when rules are enforced. That that when alcohol is less available, alcohol consumption decreases, and conversely, when it is made more available, consumption increases. That the unformed brains of teen-agers are particularly subject to being addled by alcohol.

The advocates of lowering the drinking age were unmoved by the evidence. One resident, whom I will call BB, wrote in to say this: "Surely, had this 20 year old woman been of legal drinking age, she would have been in the regulated environment of a drinking establishment and not at an underground party. The likelihood of her being overserved in that regulated environment and then ending up drunk on the roof of her sorority would be considerably diminished. Unlike Dr. M's and others' studies, this is a real life study that happened right down the street. Let's open our eyes and start to learn from these events." BB's takes the position that we can ignore the data, forget the scientific studies, and replace them with his interpretation of this particular event. BB's is a good example of what is called "anecdotal thinking." But anecdotes, standing alone, are not evidence nor can they replace the systematic gathering of evidence and statistics. Meanwhile, another neighbor of long standing, KW, answers the evidence with his own simple argument: we all drank when we were young, there were laws in place then but we ignored them, nothing will ever change, why make it hard for kids, let them drink at 18. KW is not much more logical than BB. He argues ahistorically, quite oblivious to the fact that alcohol is used differently in different cultures and in one culture a different times in history.

BB says, it's cold today, there can be no such thing as global warming; KW says, there's always been weather, and it's always been warm

When I was a teacher, I tried over and over again to explain to my freshmen that a) you can't build an argument on an anecdote, and b) that the experience of an individual is not necessarily universal. --that to gather data, to consider the context, and to apply logic were the hallmarks of the educated individual. Neither BB and KW, both of whom, I believe, graduated from college, ever took the first step in their freshman "critical thinking" class. They have their views, and they're not going to let facts get in their way.

Is it relevant that both BB and KW are Republicans? I believe it is.

But what should we do about alcohol abuse? It's an intractable problem we're not going to solve it immediately, but we have an instructive analogy in the case of tobacco, where in the U. S, the consumption of tobacco has declined significantly. We decreased tobacco use by a) prohibiting advertisements that made smoking glamorous and alluring, b) increasing taxes, c) disseminating information on lung cancer and low birthweights, etc, and d) by making tobacco less available. We could try the same with alcohol, where billions are spent by distilleries and breweries to make make alcohol use seem sophisticated and ennobling. Instead, we could discuss incarceration rates, fetal alcohol syndrome, homelessness, domestic violence, puking in the streets and choking in the bed. We could limit the number of bars and alcohol outlets. We could make drinking more expensive by raising the taxes to cover the civic cost in police, judiciary, accidents, and prisons. We could tax wine less and hard liquor more. We could rigorously enforce existing drinking-age laws. We could also encourage the use of less dangerous drugs.

In addition, we could try to improve our educational system, so that when the neighbors came to talk about alcohol abuse, they could conduct their discussion with respect for fact and logic.

January 25, 2010

Package to mail, so off I go to the post office. When I arrived, eight people are on line ahead of me. I took my place. There were only two clerks on duty and let me tell you they were not breaking any speed records. They were moving through mucilage. If I had to guess, I'd say that they were working at just above the speed in which all molecular motion ceases. Their pace seemed carefully calibrated, as if in answer to the implicit question, "what's the least possible amount of energy I can expend and still retain my job?" There was some grumbling on the line: "Only two clerks on duty!" It took me twenty-five minutes but I completed my transaction. When I left, there were ten people behind me, letters or packages in hand, shuffling and stamping their collective frustrated feet.

How much time wasted? Well, here were nineteen productive citizens taking twenty minutes or half an hour to do five minutes worth of work. You do the calculation. If there had been another clerk, and if the clerks were to move at normal human speed, I would have been in and out in a flash. Multiply the TWF (time waste factor) by all the post office stations in urban America. What an astonishing, third-world loss of productivity.

The post office has been essentially privatized. It's not allowed to run a deficit, so it cuts back on services and continues to raise the cost of mailing an envelope. And makes people wait.

But it retains from its former incarnation the lifetime-employment uncivil-service mentality. It combines the worst of free enterprise with the worst of public ownership. It's a truly remarkable solution to the implicit question, can we design a completely dysfunctional bureaucracy?

About a decade ago, some idealistic postmaster-general announced a campaign to serve every customer within ten minutes of arrival. To that end, a large clock was set in a prominent spot in the every office in the land (in ours, just where the line commences). A big PR fuss was made. About a year later, all the clocks were quietly removed. I wonder, where did they go. Does the USPS maintain an old clock warehouse somewhere in central Nebraska? Or were they discarded? Or taken home by the local postmasters. In any case, the campaign was a total disaster. The system was did not move.

The USPS didn't even do a good job of removing the clocks. When I stand in line, I stare at a wire sticking out of the wall where a clock used to hang. I stare at it for ten minutes, for twenty minutes, for half an hour....

January 11, 2010

From our window, looking left across the street, we can see a squat old cinder-block building that sits diagonally on its corner lot. I remember when it housed a gas station, then a
taqueria, and afterward, for at least a decade, an import rug store that was always 'going
out of business,' until, contrary to all expectations, it went out of
business. The building lay vacant for a year or so, but now it's
found a new purpose. It's a medical marijuana "dispensary." (Marijuana, when used for the relief of pain or nausea, is legal in Colorado).

When
we're curious, and willing to make the effort, we watch the arrival of the chronically afflicted patients. The are uniformly youthful and they come by car,
on foot, on bicycle, on skates or skateboard or scooter. The only vehicle in which they don't arrive is the wheelchair.

In fact, neither "our" dispensary nor any other bothers to pretend that their product (aka stash) is anything but recreational. GreenLeaf Farmacy, for example, advertises Kief
Hash! at $25/gram. Boulder Wellness Center offers "High Quality Medical
Marijuana: Tinctures, Vaporizers, Ointments, Teas, and More." TopShelf
Alternatives competes at $10/Gram and with "your choice of 34 home grown
strains. Edibles include Mile High Ice Cream." DrReefer
specializes in "clones." Boulder MM Dispensary is "an
upscale establishment with high quality medicine." Colorado Patients
First, "where compassion for patients and quality of medicine comes
first," offers "Sour Kush, Big Blue, Opium, AK-47, Maui Mist, Jack
White, and Pot of Gold." For each painful disease, apparently, its own uniquely targeted variety of ganja. To judge by the exuberance of the clientele, the "medicines" must be alleviating tons of pain.

How did it happen? Some years ago, voters approved an amendment to the state
constitution legalizing the medical use of marijuana. The argument was
compelling (and I voted for it). Marijuana mitigates chronic pain and also minimizes the nausea that
accompanies chemotherapy. Until this year, the state's Department of Public
Health had limited individual physicians to five such suffering patients. But then a
judge ruled that the constitutional amendment did not impose such limits, and, in the words of John Milton, "all hell broke loose."

There's no zoning (as with liquor
outlets), no sin tax (because marijuana is a prescription drug), and no
decorum.

"The latest data from the Medical Marijuana Registry
maintained by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment shows
that as of Dec. 15, 2009, a total of 820 licensed physicians had
authorized medical marijuana for 15,800 patients. Of those 820 physicians, just
15 accounted for 73 percent of total patients, and just five have authorized 49
percent of all recommendations." There are now more than eighty marijuana dispensaries in our town. (There are just ten traditional pharmacies.) It makes one wonder about the size of the underground economy.

Why don't we just legalize marijuana, and then regulate and tax it the way we do liquor.and tobacco? Of course, neither liquor nor tobacco pays its way -- the social cost of both drugs well exceed their revenues -- but that's a topic for another day.

There are bills in the legislature to regulate the marijuana industry and everyone knows that within a year there will be tight new restrictions. But until then, we will much enjoy the scene at the corner store.

January 01, 2010

Reading at one of our local Starbucks, I was, as is often the case, lost in my book. But I looked up when a late 20s-early 30s blonde and bearded man sat down at a table across the way. I noticed that he was holding his cup of coffee in an odd way. And then I realized that where his right hand should have been there were a pair of stainless steel hooks. Sad, I thought. And yet he seemed cheerful and optimistic. I wondered if I would be in such good spirits if I had lost a hand in an accident. I went back to reading, but looked up again when he fumbled with the sleeves of his jacket. And then I saw that he had no left hand either. Instead, a pair of hooks, left and right, where hands and fingers should be. What terrible accident could have caused a young man to lose both hands, I wondered. Perhaps I was more sensitive than usual, but I was moved almost to tears as I watched him manipulate his coffee and his napkin and his muffin with his mechanical prosthetics. Soon his young and attractive girlfriend joined him. She came on aluminum crutches. "Must have broken her foot," I thought. Then I saw that there was no foot and that she had only one leg.

I'm slow, but I figured it out at last.

Soldiers. Home from Iraq. Bombs -- IEDs -- took off his hands and her leg. They met at a rehabilitation hospital. Fell in love. They're trying to start life over again.

I'm not ashamed that I turned away and started to cry.

And then grief converted to anger.

That damned useless war! That idiot ignoramus Bush! That villain Cheney!. Those two megalomaniacs, and their co-conspirators, who started this war -- they're sitting pretty right now, aren't they? But these young folks right next to me -- they're not sitting so comfortably. They've paid the price.

Belatedly, I wish them all the joy that life can offer. As for crazy George and strutting Dick, there's no penalty that they can pay, there's no retribution sufficient -- but if their pernicious bodies would rot half a centimeter a day, why, that would be a start.

November 05, 2009

The woman with whom I've shared the last fifty-plus years has developed an alarming new symptom. She disappears in markets.

We'll be together, innocently pushing the basket in the vegetable section, for example, and I'll wander off to fetch some cream cheese and a half-gallon of milk. When I return, she's gone. Nowhere to be found. I walk up and down the neighboring aisles. Nothing. She's completely dematerialized. I walk up and down, back and forth, vainly searching.

After a twenty minutes, or half-an-hour, she's back, but teleported to an an entirely different part of the store. She doesn't even know that she has vanished. Sometimes she pretends that it's I who has disappeared.

I can understand that she could lose herself in the acre-and-a-half King Soopers, or in the McGuckin prairie, or on the vast Costconian steppe. But in Bradford's minuscule P & C? Or in Bradford's Main Street, comprised as it is of far fewer square feet than any mid-size contemporary Walgreen's? No, there's more here than meets the eye. This is no natural process. Something supernatural is going on.

It took some serious reflection before I came to the realization that it's a clear case of abduction by aliens. There is no other credible explanation.

I've given a name to the disorder. I call it Spousal Transient Alien Abduction Syndrome, or STAAS.

I've made some inquiries, and it seems that STAAS is not a condition found only in my family. In fact, it's quite common. More than four-fifths of the people that I questioned had experienced recent instances of STAAS. Curiously, it's much more frequently discovered in long-marrieds than among the recently-hitched. And less common among women than men. In fact, men tend to disappear for longer periods of time than women.

Moreover, just as might be expected, not a single one of the disappeared remembers that he (or she) had ever fallen into the ungentle hands of aliens -- which is certain proof that the abduction took place, inasmuch as it is well known that these extraterrestrial beings possess the ability to scrub human brains and obliterate memory.

I don't know what can be done to arrest the spread of this alarming syndrome. Perhaps a Federal task force.

October 29, 2009

Today I went to see a new doctor, a specialist. His receptionist sits behind a sign that reads "Co-payment must be made at the time of service. Failure to pay the co-payment will result in an additional charge of $10." I took a seat to wait and to fill out various forms -- and to be apprised of a "policy change": "A patient who misses an appointment without canceling 24 hours in advance will be charged $45." I read a little further: "Extended telephone conversations will be subject to a charge of $15."

I know that doctors have to make a living and I don't begrudge them a decent wage. But goodness gracious, must they transform themselves into shameless nickel-and-dimers?

I want to have confidence in my doctor. I want to think that he's the heir to Aesculapius, Hippocrates, and Jean Hersholt. I don't want to think that he's a money-hungry "provider" whose primary aim, transcending all others (especially healing), is to squeeze me for a buck here and a buck there.

Which is in fact what I did think. Not a good first impression, Dr. Provider!

October 14, 2009

I hate to fetch the mail nowadays because there are so damn many importunate communications from doctors, hospitals, from medicare, and from insurance companies. Even though I'm in relatively good health and need only routine servicing, each time I visit a doctor the system manages to generate one piece of paper after another -- most of them written in codes that are almost entirely inexplicable. Could anyone have devised a more lunatic, more inefficient health-care system?

The other day I received a letter from Great-West Healthcare, my "supplemental carrier," to this effect:

"We recently reviewed one of your claims and discovered that we mistakenly sent you a benefit check for $31.80. We now realize that payment should have been sent directly to your provider. We have reprocessed the claim to pay the provider. Therefore, this letter is a request for the $31.80 paid to you in error. Please send a check for $31.80 to the address on the back of this letter. If you have any questions, please contact our service center at the number on the front of your health plan ID card. Thank you.

Of course, there was no address on the back of the letter, so I could not respond.

But if there had been an address, this is what I would have said:

Dear Great-West Healthcare:

Thank you for you letter of August 10. I will be happy to refund the $31.80. However, I have no record of this transaction, so before I pay you, I need the following data.

A copy of a cancelled check for the amount that you claim to have sent me.

Evidence that you have actually paid the funds to the unnamed "provider." This evidence should be in the form of a cancelled check but if the $31.80 was sent as an electronic deposit, a notarized affidavit from an officer of the "provider" will be ample.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call me at my home phone number, which can be conveniently found in the local telephone book or obtained online, so that I can play you some nice elevator music while you languish on indefinite hold.

September 27, 2009

Even as my hearing deteriorates, I become more and more disturbed by excessive noise. For example: coffee shops, which in any sensible world, would be oases of tranquility, have become positively uninhabitable. When I visit such a place, I do so either to talk with a friend or to read silently. I do not go to be assaulted by what the tattooed, benose-ringed young staff fancies to be "music" -- grating sounds amplified to 11 on the Nigel Tufnel scale. And then last week I went to a baseball game at one of the new stadiums where they have embraced to the ultimate the philosophy of the "total entertainment package," which means bright blinking lights, almost constant "music," and exhortations on the giant scoreboard to "Get Loud." But baseball, more than any other sport, requires thought and concentration. It's a subtle game, not enhanced by distractions. And yet it seemed that very few of the spectators around me were actually paying attention to the events on the field. The noise forbade it. When our side's left fielder played a routine fly ball into a single -- an act which would have provoked indignation and jeers at the low-tech Ebbets Field of my youth -- the crowd remained preternaturally silent, reserving its roars for the inter-inning "kiss-cam" and similar travesties.

Do we truly enjoy or are we simply inured to the noise that has become so constant at the old ball game, in the restaurant, or even on the leafy suburban street, where the egregious leaf-blower has become an oppressive commonplace. (Why do we not ban a mega-decibel machine that is less efficient than the time-honored and virtually silent broom)?

The noise of machines and the noise of amplified sound is a relatively new phenomenon. Until 1650 or so, no such sounds oppressed our ears. There was the occasional thunderstorm, and there were church bells, and there was the clatter of horse and coach on cobblestone streets -- but there was nothing comparable to the sea of noise in which we daily swim. Our ancestors lived for a million years in a world that we would judge to be virtually silent. There were no factories, no trucks, no airplanes overhead, no electric guitars and, inasmuch as 95% of the people were village-dwelling agricultural workers, not even large crowds. The noise that we routinely endure is unprecedented and unnatural. And unhealthy as well.

May 27, 2009

I've never understood money. It doesn't do you any good until you spend it, and once you spend it, you don't have it anymore.

I never understood income, either. I was employed for most of my life at a frugal, let's call it, state university. I earned much less money than friends in the "private sector" or the trades, but it didn't seem to matter much. I never missed a meal, I sent my kids to good colleges, and I enjoyed the security of knowing that I wouldn't be laid off. Meanwhile, I spent a good hunk of my life reading books and talking about literature with young people. On the whole, it seemed like a good deal.

I did have some resentments, however, one of which was the disparity in salary between faculty and adminstrators. If we were all working in the same place, why should the guy who ran the student union, or who managed "public relations," or who lobbied the legislature, or who was in charge of campus parking or admissions, or who coached the linebackers, or who was second assistant vice chancellor for this-or-that receive a salary twice or three times as large as mine? I never grasped the reason.

But then I discovered that the real money in the University system wasn't in these areas. It was in managing the University's portfolio. A few years ago, Harvard Magazine reported that the managers of its endowment were receiving annual salaries of $8,000,000 to $10,000,000 -- or about 100 times what I was pulling down.

But, it was reported, they earned these phenomenal salaries because they were such financial geniuses -- and their genius could be judged by the enormous growth of the endowment.

I have to say that I was sceptical. I remembered one of my father's maxims: "when the stock market is going up, everybody's a genius."

Then I received a letter from Harvard's President, reporting on the steep decline in the value of the endowment.

In a fit of pique, I wrote to President Faust (her real name).

Dear President Faust: when the stock market was flying, the managers of Harvard's endowment were geniuses and were paid astonishingly high salaries. Now that the endowment has lost 30% of its value, do you plan to a) lower the salaries of endowment managers to realistic levels, and b) ask them to recompense the university for their absurd past overcompensation ? Yours, Vivian de St. Vrain (Ph.D. 1966)

I didn't expect an answer, but after several months, I received the following letter, which, truth to tell, I regard as rather cold and perfunctory.

Dear Dr. St. Vrain.

Although I cannot comment on matters of employee compensation, I understand and appreciate your concern for Harvard’s wellbeing. Please be assured that the endowment management remains entirely focused on supporting the University’s most fundamental education and research priorities.

Regards,

Drew Faust

Whoa. Back o' the hand to poor Vivian.

OK, that's it. In retaliation, I'm striking Harvard out of my will. President Faust will have to find someone else to endow that new administration building.